A system for determining a most probable cause or causes of a problem in a plant is disclosed. The system includes a plant, the plant having a plurality of subsystems that contribute to the operation of the plant, the plurality of subsystems having operating functions that produce operational signals. A plurality of sensors that are operable to detect the operational signals from the plurality of subsystems and transmit data related to the signals is also provided. An advisory system is disclosed that receives an input, the input being in the form of data from the plurality of sensors, possible input root causes of the problem, possible input symptoms of the problem and/or combinations thereof. The advisory system has an autoencoder in the form of a recurrent neural network. The recurrent neural network has sparse connectivity in a plurality of nodes, and the autoencoder is also operable to receive the input and perform multiple iterations of computations at each of the plurality of nodes as a function of the input and provide an output. The output can be in the form of possible output causes of the problem, possible output symptoms of the problem and/or combinations thereof.